Top sirloin grilling steaks for sale at the Costco store in Edmonton last week. Letter writers say the E. coli outbreak at a an Alberta processing plant points to the danger of eating meat and the poor response of officials to the problem.Larry Wong, Postmedia News
/ Vancouver Sun

CFIA will examine whether the Brooks beef processing facility has “addressed deficiencies” previously uncovered as part of the E. coli investigation, according to a statement Monday.LARRY MACDOUGAL
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

Security personnel patrol the XL Foods cattle processing plant in Brooks, Alta., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. The Alberta plant at the centre of an E. coli scare is being allowed to resume limited operations.But the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says no meat will leave the XL Foods meat packer in Brooks until the agency has approved a full reopening.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

CALGARY — The federal health department is telling Canadians to cook all mechanically tenderized steaks and roasts to “medium” doneness, as it conducts a scientific review in the aftermath of five Alberta cases of E. coli poisoning involving adulterated strip loins.

But an official with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was unable to explain Monday how the public can be certain of when it needs to take those precautions in the absence of any requirement that retailers or restaurants label tenderized products.

“As well as not knowing whether it’s tenderized or not, there seems to be a suggestion that it depends when it’s tenderized.”

At least five of the 16 patients now linked to contaminated meat from an Alberta packer at the centre of the country’s largest-ever beef recall ate steak that had been “needled” at a Costco Wholesale outlet in Edmonton prior to landing on store shelves.

But Taylor said he’s worried that some beef in Canada is also being tenderized at slaughterhouses, weeks before it may be eaten. increasing the potential risk to consumers because the bacteria has longer to grow inside the adulterated cut.

“Those are different levels of risk depending on how long it’s been from the tenderizing and when you consume it,” he said.

U.S. authorities estimate that 18 per cent of whole beef cuts consumed south of the border have been tenderized, but Taylor said he doesn’t know how widespread the practice is in Canada.

While Health Canada and the PHAC conduct their investigation and risk assessment of the issue over the next three months, the federal department is recommending any tenderized product should now be cooked to an internal temperature of 71 C (160 F), just like ground beef, to ensure any bacteria inside the cut is killed.

Prior to this announcement, the federal government had said it was acceptable to cook any whole cut to to 63 C (145 F), a temperature that equates to medium-rare.

“Should consumers be uncertain if a product has been mechanically tenderized, they are encouraged to ask the food seller or food service provider,” says a department news release.

“Health Canada is also actively working with the retail and food industry to support its efforts to identify tenderized beef through labels, signage or other means.”

The department hopes to have these voluntary measures in place over the next two to three weeks.

Herald queries to major retailers — including Safeway Canada Ltd., Superstore and Sobeys Ltd. — over the past two weeks about whether they sold tenderized cuts got no response.

However, Alberta Health Services and the province’s health department confirmed Costco Wholesale has complied with a request to stop needling product at its stores. Spokesman John Muir said public health officials also contacted other major retailers “to ensure the practice was not ongoing in those operations either.”

But Mark Klassen, director of technical services with the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, the tenderization of beef has been “quite widespread” in this country for years.

Klassen said research by Dr. Colin Gill at the federal agriculture facility in Lacombe had determined that medium-rare cooking of adulterated cuts was adequate to ensure food safety.

“There wouldn’t be much point in cooking it to 71 C,” he said.

“The tenderness would be lost cooking it to that temperature.”

There have been several E. coli scares in the U.S. over the past decade linked to tenderized beef, including the 2009 recall of 109,000 kilograms of steak that sickened 21 people in 16 states.

In the wake of those outbreaks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service is proposing mandatory labelling of tenderized products.

“The labels would also provide consumers with instructions on how to cook the product to eliminate potential food-borne pathogens inside,” an inspection service official said.

Laura Trivers, spokesman for the Centre for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention in North Carolina, said the labelling regulation is long overdue.

“Sometimes a steak is not a steak,” Trivers said.

“If consumers are going to be able to protect themselves, then government needs to step in and regulate so the public gets the information it needs to safely cook a product.”

Until the recent outbreak, Taylor said PHAC officials weren’t worried about tenderized product because the incidence of E. coli poisoning in Canada had declined 60 per cent since 2006.

“This current situation with XL is a bit of a game-changer in terms of the ways we look at these sort of incidents,” he said.

“We have hard evidence now that some of the illnesses seem to be caused by tenderized meat.”

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